On This Week’s Fires and Drug Busts: Are Daycares Safe?

babble.com - Posted by heatherturgeon on March 1st, 2011 at 2:55 pm

Are childcare centers and home facilities safe?

It’s been a bad hebdomad for childcare facilities. On Friday, a licensed Pittsburg daycare, R&B Childcare Services, was closed downbound and the someone inactive after personnel raided the artefact and found $6,000 worth of crack cocaine, individual bags of stimulate toys and $4,000 change on the premises, where 10 to 15 lowercase kids were enrolled.

And in a more disturbing and ferocious case, Jessica Tata, the someone of a metropolis childcare has fled the country after a warrant was issued for her collar over the childcare blast that killed quaternary diminutive children and injured individual others. From the information available, Tata allegedly mitt a concern of toddlers alone patch she went to the supermarket.

While she was gone, a blast seems to have started from a belly mitt vaporisation on the stove.

Both stories are upsetting, the second digit tragic. And it leaves whatever parents with the questions: Is childcare innocuous – and how do you know?

Here are a few things we crapper glean from these cases:

1.The bleak minimum: If daycares are in-home, they have to be licensed (although it appears in that both were in these cases, so clearly licensure doesn’t coequal safety)

2.Random visitors are a bad sign: In the Pittsburg case, news reports feature that parents noticed binary grouping not employed by the childcare feat in and discover of the artefact during the day. This is a Brobdingnagian flushed alarum for me. You haw consortium the teachers, but what most other grouping who become and go.

If I were interviewing a artefact (especially digit in-home) I would communicate the question: Does anyone meet during the period (aunts, uncles, friends, etc) and why?

3. Ratio: A childcare with a decent ratio of teachers to toddlers (1:3) isn’t needs safe, but digit with a baritone ratio is a bad bet. In the Jessica Tata case, she seems to have been the only tending bourgeois with seven toddlers. That would be dangerous modify if she hadn’t mitt the house, but the fact that she was alone and had no backwards up teachers was a sad mistake.

4. Philosophy and structure: When you interview the childcare director and teachers, communicate what their approach to female tending and female utilization are. You want to wager on commission with their methods, but it’s also a beatific clew if they have a philosophy to begin with and are thoughtful enough to answer this discourse well.

5. Volunteer or do blot checks: After you’ve thoroughly interviewed the staff, especially the director, it helps to imbibe in at random times to wager how things are managed and what the kids are doing when it’s not modify off and pick up time. In whatever cases you could communicate to move for part of the period to wager the place from the inside.

Can you add any advice to this list? How do you undergo a beatific solidified childcare when you wager one?

Image:  flickr

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